Page 1 of Dark Memories
Chapter One
“Come on, admit it, Harry. You’re going to miss me.”
“Not.” Delaney Harrison—Harry to her fellow detectives—would miss her partner, but she wasn’t about to admit it. She’d been paired with Gabe Calder from her first day in Major Crimes, and they’d evolved into a well-oiled machine. Her partner had gone and fallen in love and was disgustingly happy. He was taking his girlfriend to the Bahamas for a romantic getaway.
“Besides, you’re only going to be gone a week. Not long enough to notice you’re missing.”
Gabe clutched his chest. “You wound me.”
She rolled her eyes. “You missed your calling. You should be onstage.”
He grinned, and then his expression turned serious. He glanced around the room before leaning over his desk. “I’m going to ask Cara to marry me.”
Like she hadn’t seen that coming. Ever since Cara Jenner had walked into his life in the form of the only witness to a murder, Gabe had been smitten by the woman. Not that Harry didn’t like her. She did. It was all the mushy love business she didn’t believe in.
“You don’t think it’s too soon?” Their desks were bumped together, facing each other in their cubicle. She leaned back in her chair and told herself to keep her mouth shut. She’d never seen Gabe happier, and that was what counted. Just because a man had broken her heart, proving that being in love sucked sour pickles, didn’t mean she couldn’t be happy for her partner.
“No, I do not. She’s my heart, Harry.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Someday the right man will come along and you’ll understand. Just don’t shoot him before giving him a chance.”
It was a running joke in the department that she’d shoot the first man who showed an interest in her. Probably true. What none of them knew was that she’d once worshipped the ground a certain man walked on. As much as she hated Zach Jamison, he had taken her heart and refused to give it back. That his name even entered her mind pissed her off.
“I’m happy for you, Gabe. I really am. Cara’s a great girl, and you two are going to make disgustingly beautiful babies.” For real. Without doubt, Gabe was eye candy with his black hair, green eyes, the barely there scruff on his face, and the black-framed glasses that only added to his sex appeal. And Cara was gorgeous, too.
Those green eyes of his turned soft and dreamy. “I want a little girl who looks just like her, but Cara says our first child will be a boy who looks like his daddy.”
“Oh God. Just stop it before I gag. Go on. Get out of here. Take your honey away where you’ll sip silly drinks with umbrellas in them while you make goo-goo eyes at her.”
He laughed. “I think I’ll do just that.” He straightened his already neatly organized desk. “See you in a week.”
“I’ll be right here.” After he left, she stared at her messy desk and considered organizing it for the millionth time since teaming up with an obsessively neat partner. “Oh, to hell with it.” She knew where everything was, and even if she did tidy up, it would take less than three days before it looked the same way again.
She sighed as she debated joining the other Major Crimes detectives for Friday night drinks. Deciding she wasn’t in the mood—and for that she blamed Zach Jamison for escaping from the locked box in her mind that she’d exiled him to—she went home.
The highlight of her weekend was the self-defense class she taught to females of any age who wanted to learn how to protect themselves. It pleased her that seven teenage girls had signed up. If Harry had anything to do with it, not another girl would suffer Abbie’s fate.
That was another box tightly locked up, though, one she couldn’t bear to revisit. And if she’d built strong-as-shit walls around herself, ones that isolated her from more hurt, so be it. Loneliness beat heartbreak any day.
* * *
Harry started off her Monday morning writing up a report on the arrest of a young man and his girlfriend for a string of home robberies. The couple had been so zonked out on meth that they’d left an easy-to-follow trail. It had taken her and Gabe only two days to identify the suspects, but twice that long to find them because they lived in a 1972 Volkswagen piece-of-junk bus and hadn’t stayed in the same place two nights in a row.
One reason she loved working in Major Crimes was she never knew what case was going to land in her lap. They covered everything from murder investigations to sex crimes. The sex crimes were the ones she wanted most of all. Nothing made her happier than to slap handcuffs on a person—man or woman—exploiting women and children and know they were going to spend years behind bars.
Neither Gabe nor any of her fellow detectives at the Dark Falls, Colorado Police Department had an inkling of why she’d made up her mind at the age of seventeen that come hell or high water she was going to be a detective someday.
It was a small world, though. Gabe’s mother had been her inspiration. Now a captain with the Denver police, at the time Ann Calder had been one of the Denver detectives assigned to Abbie’s case. Harry didn’t know if Captain Calder remembered her, but she probably did. The woman was as sharp as they came and had a mind like a steel trap. If so, she had kept the knowledge to herself, and Harry appreciated that.
No one had connected Harry to Abbie Monroe since their last names were different, and she liked it that way. Abbie’s disappearance and the subsequent events had made the national news, and it hadn’t taken Harry long to grasp that when anyone learned they were half sisters, things turned awkward. People didn’t know what to say. Since there was nothing anyone could say to ease the pain or the horror of what had happened to Abbie, Harry never told anyone who she was. She dealt with her rage and grief by hunting bad people who did bad things to children.
“Harry, in my office.”
Her captain’s command had a sense of urgency to it, and Harry followed Eve Scanlon into her office. She hoped she wasn’t about to be assigned to another department while her partner was off enjoying a week of fun in the sun. She stood at attention in front of the captain’s desk, and since Harry had a tendency to see the glass as half-empty, she waited to hear whatever bad news was coming her way.
“Sit, Harry,” the boss said.
Harry sat. Eve Scanlon was a great captain. They all liked and respected her, and Harry appreciated that Eve didn’t treat her any differently than she did the guys. Even though they were both women, they weren’t buddies. Actually, Eve wasn’t buddies with any of the Major Crimes detectives, and Harry thought that was wise of her.
Usually Eve would make a few minutes of small talk, but the terse command, thin line of her lips, and the serious glint in her eyes confirmed Harry’s suspicion that she wasn’t going to like whatever she was about to hear.
